Readers Write: Obamacare better, but single payer best

The Island Now

Once again, the discussion of single-payer health reform has been revived during the presidential primary. 

It affords the opportunity to present expert information on the meaning of such a solution to health care woes and confusion.

First, dismiss all the nonsense created by the 62 separate Congressional votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Every few weeks they present a bill, it passes, and goes to the President to be signed. He then vetoes it. Undeterred, the Congress wastes some more time to repeat their activity. 

They never present a plan to provide health care to all of the country. No wonder their approval rating on performance is 9 percent. 

How can we have any confidence in a totally irrational Congress?

No matter that the nation, when polled, overwhelmingly approves of health coverage. 

But confusion runs so deep because our lawmakers are not interested in what the public wants. 

Their continual rants do not help. At the simplest level many still do not understand that the Affordable Care Act is the official name for our national health program. 

Many still think that Obamacare is a different plan. It definitely is not. 

Politicians, in their effort to malign the ACA created another a separate name to pin the blame on the President’s singular achievement. Just plain nonsense.

Now to business. 

In many ways, the ACA has achieved much, including many persons who otherwise could not get coverage under the overly inefficient, complex, exclusionary private system that it replaced five years ago. 

In that period the problems with the way it has been organized are becoming burdensome and overly expensive, while still not including the entire nation.

Single-payer reform is really the only effective remedy that every other industrialized nation in the world has been able to implement. 

Every system created abroad has its own program but every one of them has achieved universal coverage at much less cost and with superior health consequences. 

We are now faced with a crisis because we must reduce costs and complexity. I think at this point that the inability of our Congress to present a viable alternative speaks volumes about their failure to concoct anything that would satisfy Americans. 

Indeed when the ACA was in danger of being defunded, and thus killed, Congressional critics were in deathly fear of the wrath of the public should that have happened.

Take hope, my fellow Americans. If you tell Congress to shut up, stop making fools of themselves and start listening to a nonpartisan physicians group, Physicians for a National Health Program, that has been studying the challenge for more years than most of our current Congress has been in office. 

Instead of listening to those who have the most to gain, the private insurers and Big Pharma, who are still too powerful, spending billions to lobby our lawmakers into working for their greedy interest, we must understand and refute the myths about single payer.

Those of us who have experienced the way Medicare works have seen how well it functions. 

Despite the myths and lies about losing your doctors, Medicare enrollees see their own doctors. 

ACA unfortunately is burdened by the multiplicity of possible plans offered by private insurers. 

Each of these plans has its own marketing, enrollment, billing, utilization reviews, and so on. Of course, this adds a layer of administrative costs that allow the private insurers to earn millions of dollars in profit. 

When Medicare-eligible patients are served, their claims are processed by a system that is comprehensible. 

I shudder, as a Medicare member, when I see the number  of plans that makes it necessary for patients to estimate what their medical needs will be in the future. 

Can anyone be comfortable trying to be clairvoyant?

A single-payer plan, based on H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, would guarantee coverage for all necessary medical care. 

It would include prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and preventive care, emergency services, dental, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care and correction, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable medical equipment, palliative care, podiatric care, and long term care. Job based coverage, gradually being eliminated, and loss of coverage, if unemployed, would not be a problem.

Two thirds of the country support improved Medicare for All, as well as 600 labor organizations and many civic and faith-based groups. We know that big money has managed to convince the public that these improvements are unfeasible but the general public already knows that the current faulty system is fraught with inefficiencies and ever increasing costs. while still leaving millions uninsured.

The public, if it listens to the facts and understands that an equitable, financially responsible and humane system will cost less in terms of a drain on our economy and eliminate much suffering. 

We cannot permit politics to deprive our nation of a human right.

We can achieve single payer. Allowing total rejection of the ACA means chaos.

Esther Confino

New Hyde Park

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